Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Early this morning I saw this in the UK papers (and Malta’s, I think):
NHS hospitals are using end-of-life care to help elderly patients to die because they are difficult to look after and take up valuable beds, a top doctor has warned.
He talks about removing a “patient from the LCP despite significant resistance.”
Oh, you don’t know about LCP? Read it all
He’s 24 or 25 years old with a wife and three children. He lives in northwest Mexico. I’ve known him since (his) babyhood. His initials are GS.
He has been trying to get help for his back injury from the government hospital. (Such help is supposed to be facilitated by and paid for by his employer.) Neither has been helpful, at least not much at all.
So, after receiving a money gift from up here, he set out to get some tests and opinions from a private (as opposed to a government) specialist.
The specialist can’t proceed without some sort of signed paper from the government hospital. GS went to get that on Monday.
As I understand it, when the government hospital/doctor learned why GS wanted that paper, they changed their tune and said they would help him. (Apparently, the private doctor could get them in big trouble for not helping him.)
So GS was admitted to the government hospital on Monday. He’s still there. He’s afraid of the notorious carelessness and cold-heartedness of so many doctors and nurses in that system. In an earlier “event” with them a year or more ago, they worked on one of his fingers and left it worse. Understandably, he’s very leery of them working on his back (or ruptured disc or cracked vertebra or whatever the issue is).
I texted him for more details a few minutes ago, also asking how he wants us to be praying for him. Here’s my translation of his reply:
| It looks like they are going to do some tests on my spine to learn what really is my problem. Pray that God would show Himself in all this. |
Thanks,
Mark
Help thy neighbor through crisis
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I bought the Wall Street Journal at the airport. On the opinion page was a letter from James S. Martin, a Mennonite from Scurry, Texas. When it comes to health care and meeting social needs, Martin sees little advantage to insurance and entitlement programs offered through the federal government and private sector.
"Our communities have been successfully meeting our own financial needs for 500 years," Martin wrote. "How relieved I am to rely on the voluntary sharing of my own church community." If our policies were built upon the simple faith of the Mennonites, this crisis would have never happened because the good of the community would have been put ahead of personal gain. The families who made it through the Great Depression helped and relied on one another. It may be that we all have to do that again. Martin believes the Mennonite and Amish form of mutual aid and a community support system will endure. "After all, it springs from a 2,000-year-old imperative," Martin writes. "Bear one anothers burdens" Galatians 6:2. |